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The Semiotics of Soul Food: Frommer’s, Fried Chicken and the Afro-fusion Delights of Harlem The Semiotics of Soul Food: Frommer’s, Fried Chicken and the Afro-fusion Delights of Harlem Monique Taylor Abstract Faded family photos place me in Harlem as early as the mid-1960s when, as a girl, I made the suburban to urban trek each summer with my family in our wood-paneled station wagon. Harlem to me then meant deciphering the Southern roots transplanted north of my Aunt Skeeter and Uncle Tyrone. Along with townhomes selling for millions of dollars, the current upscaling of Harlem bestows a reputation as a ‘must-eat’ site on foodie treks through Manhattan. A weekend food truck rally is made popular through Facebook. In guidebooks such as Frommers, online endorsements by trip advisor and insider tips from the sassy Zagat guide, today’s traveler is urged to make Harlem a destination for eating. Magazine, social media and blog talk of a restaurant renaissance depicts a burgeoning scene that on its surface communicates tolerance and diversity through food and eating. The following essay is an analysis of Harlem food and eating communities that are defined through food discourse(s). In what Annie Hauck- Lawson terms ‘foodvoices’ I explore the role gentrification plays in changing Harlem foodways. Keywords Harlem, Langston Hughes, Frommers, Foodways, Food Truck Rally, Zagat, Frank’s, Ghetto, Soul Food Coldnoon: International Journal of Travel Writing & Travelling Cultures 65 Monique Taylor The Semiotics of Soul Food: Frommer’s, Fried Chicken and the Afro-fusion Delights of Harlem Monique Taylor I can never put on paper the thrill of the underground ride to Harlem … At every station I kept watching for the sign: 135TH STREET. When I saw it, I held my breath. I came out onto the platform with two heavy bags and looked around. It was still early morning and people were going to work. Hundreds of colored people! I wanted to shake hands with them, speak to them. I hadn’t seen any colored people for so long — that is, any Negro colored people. I went up the steps and out into the bright September sunlight. Harlem! I stood there, dropped my bags, took a deep breath and felt happy again.1 Faded family photos place me in Harlem as early as the mid- 1960s when, as a girl, I made the suburban to urban trek each summer with my family in our wood-paneled station wagon. Harlem to me then meant deciphering the Southern roots transplanted north of my Aunt Skeeter and Uncle Tyrone. Long after the other children had gone to bed, I was the small set of eyes in the corner of the living room watching loud and long games of bid whist through a haze of cigarette smoke. Always on the night of our arrival the room was abuzz with 1 Langston Hughes. “From The Big Sea,” in Nathan Irvin Huggins ed. Voices from the Harlem Renaissance (Oxford University Press, 1976) p. 90. Volume 6, number 3 | December 2017, Sage Issue 66 The Semiotics of Soul Food: Frommer’s, Fried Chicken and the Afro-fusion Delights of Harlem news from back home and filled with a lingering aroma and praise for my Aunt Skeeter’s fried chicken, collard greens and corn bread which had been prepared in the North Carolina style of my mother’s family. These were hot summer nights cooled by the breeze of an electric fan and tall glasses of sweet tea or cherry red Kool-Aid. In the morning the adults would plot the downtown explorations of our New York travels over plates of eggs, country ham, grits and biscuits. I continued these visits to see relatives in Harlem well into my twenties when I was a college student at Yale. After long weekends of study and sightseeing, I was packed off on the train back to New Haven with foil wrapped packages of chicken and greens and mac and cheese. Decades later when I made the gentrification in Harlem the subject of my ethnographic field work, I connected my family’s Harlem experience to that of many of the black migrants who had made their way to Harlem in waves going back to the early 1900s bringing with them distinct food culture(s) that can be traced to the ends of a far-flung set of geographic roots in Africa, the Caribbean and the American south. These days it appears that uptown gentrification is transforming what folklorists and anthropologists would term the “foodways of Harlem.” Along with townhomes selling for millions of dollars, the current upscaling of Harlem bestows a reputation as a ‘must-eat’ site on foodie treks through Manhattan. From a plate of reimagined fried chicken on a bed of grits to fusion cuisine that serves up sides like Afro-Asian collard green salad, my travel to Harlem in the summer of 2014 brought me face to face with the elasticity of foodways in ways I have yet to fully digest. In guidebooks such as Fodors and Frommer’s, online endorsements by trip advisor as well as insider tips from the Coldnoon: International Journal of Travel Writing & Travelling Cultures 67 Monique Taylor sassy Zagat guide, today’s travellers are urged to make Harlem a destination for eating. “Marcus Samuelsson’s Red Rooster created the influx,” claims a 2013 on-line Fodor’s post, “and now [other] notable spots help solidify Harlem as a bona fide food and restaurant destination.” A weekend food truck rally is made popular through Facebook and food blogs promising tastes that range from “a 21st century spin on the traditional Japanese hibachi” to “authentic organic Columbian food” that “skillfully blend[s] tradition with eco-friendly ingredients.” Magazine, social media and blog talk of a “restaurant renaissance” depict a burgeoning scene that on its surface communicates tolerance and diversity through food and eating. But after decades of decline, the transformation of Harlem into a top destination for travel, food and eating invites curiosity and questions: When did this “restaurant renaissance” take off and why? Who are its actors and authors? How does it reveal the contradictions of capital in neighborhood restructuring? As anthropologist James Watson argues, “food is a universal medium that illuminates a wide range of other cultural practices … that are implicated in a complex field of relationships, expectations and choices.”2 Read closely, the meals, menus and marketing of a food scene offer a semiotics of food tourism and a multiplicity of meanings behind a real and imagined Harlem that is as cooked up as the ingredients appearing on its tables these days. 2 James L. Watson and Melissa Caldwell, The Cultural Politics of Food and Eating (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2005) p. 1. Volume 6, number 3 | December 2017, Sage Issue 68 The Semiotics of Soul Food: Frommer’s, Fried Chicken and the Afro-fusion Delights of Harlem In the Beginning Some of the earliest travelers to Harlem are identified in Gilbert Osofsky’s classic work, Harlem: The Making of a Ghetto. As Osofsky documents the evolution of Harlem from its aristocratic roots to the predominantly Negro ghetto of the early twentieth century, he introduces 1860s’ visitors to pastoral, rural Harlem as “downtowners wandering about on country jaunts.”3 Arriving in Harlem at that time was accomplished by a long journey that extended from Central Park northward along “the road,” or Harlem Lane as St. Nicholas Avenue was then known.4 St. Nicholas Avenue, which originates near the intersection of 110th Street (Central Park North) and Lenox Avenue, heading northwest toward 125th Street, where it follows the north border of St. Nicholas Park, was originally conceived to improve access to Central Park.5 According to a New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission report, “it became a popular route for trotters heading to the Harlem Speedway and Jerome Park, where the American Jockey Club built a racecourse seating eight thousand spectators.”6 At the end of the 19th century, the distance and seclusion of Harlem made it attractive as “the country retreat of a burgeoning metropolis” and for an “exclusive class” that 3 Gilbert Osofsky, Harlem: The Making of a Ghetto (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1971) p. 74. 4 Ibid. p. 84. 5 Matthew Postal, Hamilton Heights/Sugar Hill Historic District Extension: Designation Report (New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission, 2001) p. 5. 6 Ibid. Coldnoon: International Journal of Travel Writing & Travelling Cultures 69 Monique Taylor counted Comodore Vanderbilt among its ranks, Harlem also offered rest and relaxation in the form of drink and dining: After a day on the country these “fashionable people” might stop at Toppy McGuires Clubhouse or sip wine at the intriguing Brossi’s Tunnel, bored out of rock at One Hundred and Twenty-second Street. “Harlem had become the rural retreat of the aristocratic New Yorker,” an old Manhattanite recalled, and its “chief charm [was] its well- bred seclusion …”7 Many writers have noted that the black claim to a prevailing Harlem narrative often has rewritten or neglected a longer Harlem history in which a white elite as well as a German, Italian and Irish immigrant working poor were previously the inhabitants and creators of Harlem’s cultural identity and its traditions.8 This history would include and extend to the foodways of Harlem as well. “Dear Carl,” Harlem’s poet laureate Langston Hughes wrote to well- known renaissance patron Carl Van Vechten: … do you mean to tell me that you do not know where Franks is! Or do I read your card wrong? Franks is the large restaurant on the north side of West 125th street, exactly 315 West 125th Street.

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